Scrapbook

A little over a week ago lady in my ward called and asked if I would help her with a scrapbook for her son. He has a brain tumor that has robbed him of much enjoyment from life. Last fall he got to go to Austin, Texas to meet his favorite team, the Longhorn's, and ever since he has wanted the pictures in a scrapbook. With 60 some pictures and no idea as to how to put it together Linda has been quite intimidated by the request. So she called me in hopes that maybe I could help. How could I say no? (Besides, a few years ago I set a little lifetime challenge for myself to see how many lives I could bless with handmade items, be it meals, crafts or otherwise and this would be one more opportunity.) However, there was one complication: she wanted to give it to him for his birthday on June 1st. If anyone knows me and how I scrapbook, assembling a single page can easily take 1-2 days and I had just over a week to pull 26 pages together. I enlisted my family's help and it became all of our service project. That helped with some of the cooking and household duties, but that didn't take much pressure off my end of things. As I worked and struggled on the first few pages, I remembered the many prayers I had said for that family and requests to know how I could help them. I realized that having this assignment was an answer to my prayers and with that I could solicit Heaven's help in completing it. It may sound funny, but before I started most layouts I knelt down beside my scrapbook table and prayed for help. Sometimes a little picture came into my mind as to how to arrange the pictures and other elements on the page but sometimes not. However, each layout that I prayed over came together very quickly--in just a couple of hours or less. For me that is nothing short of miraculous. I'm so grateful for the times that I remember to call on Heaven's help for any of my assignments. Help is ever present and given liberally even on seemingly unimportant things like scrapbook pages. Putting it together turned out to be a very spiritual experience and brought many blessings to our home. Here are a few pages from the book: (click on any to enlarge as desired)